No. 2 · Week of November 12, 2026

ShareChat hires directors as AI cuts costs

Plus day one of the Summit, who hired and the jobs open now.

We tracked 65 vertical drama stories from November 5 to November 11. Here are the ones that matter, plus who hired, from the studio career pages we watch every day.

The 30-second version

• AI is cutting what a microdrama costs to make, and ShareChat is hiring creative directors to run its AI shows.
• Meta starts testing Series, its seasons and episodes for Reels, next week.
• Brands kept paying for whole shows, with a Lana Condor rom-com and an Urban Decay ghost story.
• The Micro Drama Summit opened with five talks, from a $900 AI series to an African microdrama with 100 million views.
• Micro Drama Summit 3 adds an in-person event next year, and you get to vote on the city.
• Writers did most of the applying on our site.

Day one at the Micro Drama Summit

The Summit opened on Wednesday with five sessions. Every talk has free clips on the Summit site, and ticket holders can watch the full replays. Days two and three run today and tomorrow.

Shantanu Tungare: AI replaces VFX, not actors

Shantanu's Bulb Chamka Studios delivers five to six hours of microdrama a month to Indian and US platforms, and clients order it by the hour, not by the episode. A two-hour order runs about 100 episodes, and he treats the first 10 as the test of what the audience wants. On small orders he aims for 100% profit per minute, and takes less on big ones. "AI is that VFX replacement. It is not the replacement of the actor or the director." Watch the clips

Oma Areh: 100 million views was no accident

Billion Naira Bride, the first microdrama from Oma's Digital Creator Africa Academy, hit 25 million views in four days and passed 100 million in under two months. "There is no way that this was luck. This was engineering," she said. Every story they make has to score 72% in Greenlight Vertical, her data tool that tests the synopsis, the tropes and the series engine before anything is shot. African viewers mostly pay through telco bundles and USSD codes, not credit cards. Her bet on where the next hit comes from: "We have stories per square meter." Watch the clips

Austin Zartman: a whole series for about $900

Austin, a screenwriter who spent two years as a creative lead at Pocket FM, made ASHES by himself: 15 episodes of AI-animated sci-fi, 34 minutes in all, for about $900. He writes the full story before he generates a single image, and keeps every video prompt to one subject action and one camera move. Then there's his 80% rule: get a clip to about 80% of what's in your head and move on. Watch the clips

Adrion Trujillo: go bigger while AI is cheap

Adrion, founder of Top-Up and a lead writer at DramaWave, says a show cost about $250,000 last year and about $15,000 to $50,000 this year, so platforms are taking chances they used to pass on. By his count, 95% of the verticals made since April are AI, and writing work is up 60%. The catch is that only 1.3% of AI shows succeed, against one in four for live action. And writers still don't share in the upside. One of his shows made about $2.5 million, by his estimate. He was paid $4,000 flat. Watch the clips

Olumide Gbenro: QC is the job now

Olumide's Ogun Studios makes AI microdramas meant to pass for live action. He runs it with more than 40 contractors, and most of them now do quality control, where it used to be mostly editors. About 20% of generations still come back with errors that need redoing. The studio charges $500 to $1,000 a minute, up from about $300. "Everything is easy. It's human taste that we have left." Watch the clips

Micro Drama Summit 3: you pick the city

We're adding an in-person event to Micro Drama Summit 3 next year, and our community decides where it happens. Ten cities are on the ballot, from Valletta to Penang, or you can write in your own. Tap a city to see the pitch, then cast your vote.

Who hired this week

We added 163 jobs from 57 companies this week. Of those, 128 were creative and content roles. The rest were tech, sales and ops jobs at the same companies.

The busiest studio posted 33 of them, and 47 more posted 1 to 14 each. Across everyone, 58 of the 128 had "AI" in the title. Pro members see which studios are hiring.

By role: 46 AI artist and AI filmmaker, 36 editing and post, 15 content and business, 12 acting, 8 writing.

Readers clicked apply 199 times this week, and 107 of those clicks went to writing jobs. The most-clicked was Production Coordinator Intern at JUCCEE Shorts, with 53 clicks, and it's still open.

Jobs open now

• Motion Designer, Story, San Francisco, $95,000 to $140,000 a year.
• Proof Listener, Pocket FM, remote, $20 an hour.
• Social Media Creative (Contract), FLORA, New York City, $50 to $125 an hour.
• Content Operations & Strategy Manager, CandyJar (Inkitt), San Francisco, $120,000 to $150,000 a year.
• Shorts Production Intern, Dhar Mann Studios, Burbank, $17 an hour.
• Editor + Motion Graphics, Luma AI, remote, $126,000 to $147,000 a year.
• Sr. Content Producer, Newform, New York City, $110,000 to $120,000 a year.
• GenAI Specialist, Amazon MGM Studios, Culver City.

More in writer jobs and remote jobs.

Another 185 creative jobs are in their first 30 days, when only Pro members see the company and can apply. A few of them:

• A remote AI artist and AI filmmaker role paying $60,000 to $100,000 a year.
• A remote editing and post role paying $28,000 to $58,000 a year.
• Creative Lead, AI Filmmaking, remote, $125,000 to $200,000 a year.
• A remote AI artist and AI filmmaker role paying $100,000 to $130,000 a year.

Free members see them after day 30.

Brands paid for the whole show

Lana Condor and her husband Anthony De La Torre star in The Receipt, a six-part holiday rom-com from the rewards app Fetch, with Dove, Betty Crocker and Breyers written into the story. It premieres December 3, with episodes of two to four minutes (The Hollywood Reporter, Nov 10).

Urban Decay's six-episode ReelShort series Ghost Hunter Hotline drew 3.8 million views in its first five days, by the brand's own count. L'Oréal made it directly with ReelShort in about four weeks. L'Oréal USA's Han Wen: "Speed is really important in the current context of marketing" (Marketing Dive, Nov 5).

Canvas, a New York studio, pays the full cost of each show and gives the creator 30% to 50% of the IP, then earns it back from subscriptions. It makes 10 shows a month and wants to get to 25 to 50 (Net Influencer, Nov 6).

Platforms and money

Meta starts testing Series on November 16, a tool that lets select creators bundle Reels into episodes on Facebook and Instagram. One of the first shows is Pixie USA's Christmas at Maple Hollow Inn, 20 episodes and 38 minutes in all, made with Bob Evans. It launches November 14 and also runs on YouTube and TikTok (Deadline, Nov 6).

ReelShort is projected to pass $1 billion in revenue this year, and Hearst Ventures' Ken Bronfin says about 95% of it comes from subscriptions. Finding viewers is the expensive part. ReelShort spent 55% of its 2025 revenue on user acquisition and marketing, per Media Partners Asia, and an Owl & Co. and Holywater report found only 5% of viewers heard about a show by word of mouth (Forbes, Nov 10).

RTL+ now plays the first episodes of five CandyJar romance series inside its app in Germany, then sends viewers to the CandyJar app with 50 free coins. It's CandyJar's first big European media deal (Broadband TV News, Nov 6).

Turkish distributor Inter Medya licensed its microdrama catalog to TelevisaUnivision's ViX, Canal 2 in El Salvador and Caracol's free app Ditu (TTV News, Nov 9).

AI and the people it affects

ShareChat's parent company has put Rs 100 crore into AI microdramas this year, paid from its own cash. CTO Nitin Jain says AI has cut the cost of a series, normally Rs 15 to 20 lakh, by about 40%, and the target is 70%. The company is hiring creative directors to make AI dramas at scale. Asked whether the money means more creative or more technical hiring, Jain said, "I think the answer is both." AI titles are about 10% of its QuickTV catalogue, headed for 30% to 40%. Viewers still leave AI shows sooner: about half of those who start one reach episode 20, against about 60% for live action (The Economic Times, Nov 10).

EloElo's CEO Saurabh Pandey says AI now handles 75% to 80% of its microdrama making, scripts and editing included, after an $80 million raise (NewsBytes, Nov 5).

In China, six people with no film training made the AI drama Armed Into Song with Seedance 2.5, working remotely. Its ten seasons on Hongguo passed 12 billion views. Head planner Zhang Hansheng says it cost about 1 million yuan, mostly computing power, and that the widely shared 10 million yuan return is wrong. An ordinary shot takes about three generations, and battle shots often take more than ten (BigGo Finance, Nov 8).

Actress Zhao Liying's portrait-rights suit against Hongguo's operator was heard in a Beijing court on November 10. The case says short dramas used AI face-swapping to put her face on characters she never played. There's no verdict yet (Trending on Weibo, Nov 11).

At a forum in Macau, Beijing professor Zhang Lanshan warned about formulaic AI dramas: "It also goes against artistic creation and causes aesthetic fatigue among audiences" (South China Morning Post, Nov 10).

Numbers worth saving

• 11% of US internet households watch microdramas, according to Parks Associates research (PR Newswire via Yahoo Finance, Nov 5).
• India's microdrama ad market is projected to grow from Rs 24 crore in FY26 to Rs 210 crore in FY27, on Redseer estimates cited by RVCJ Media's A. Aziz Khan. Subscriptions made up about 99% of revenue in FY26 (Storyboard18, Nov 6).
• Japan's Bump can film a 25-episode series, about 45 minutes in all, in four days, and has 20 to 30 projects in production at once (Variety, Nov 8).

Dates for your calendar

• November 11 to 13: Micro Drama Summit, on now. Live online · Replay included for 1 year.
• November 17 to 18: Parks Associates' Future of Video in Marina del Rey, California, with a microdrama panel on the first day.
• December 11: early entry deadline for the Telly Awards' microseries track. ReelShort is a season partner this year (Net Influencer, Nov 5).

Worth a read

• Microdramas: why more Brits are watching these 'snackable' shows, BBC, with UK fans, producers and a director on his 38th microdrama.
• YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels emerge as bigger threat to microdrama apps than rival platforms, Storyboard18, on who owns the IP.

See you next week. Know a story or a job we missed? Hit reply.

The Vertical Times is the weekly news and hiring paper for vertical drama from Vertical Drama Jobs.